


a terrible impasse

by IronCladFeatherFeet (handschuhmaus)



Category: Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Genre: F/M, Gardens & Gardening, May not be canon compliant, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2019-10-01
Packaged: 2020-10-20 20:50:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20681744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/IronCladFeatherFeet
Summary: it has been rather too long since I reread Jane Eyre, actually.The title is a rephrasing of one of the scenarios in xkcd'stakeon Asimov's Laws of Robotics. It does come up eventually and briefly, although not in reference to robots.





	a terrible impasse

**Author's Note:**

> <strike>it has been rather too long since I reread Jane Eyre, actually.</strike>
> 
> The title is a rephrasing of one of the scenarios in xkcd's [take](https://xkcd.com/1613/) on Asimov's Laws of Robotics. It does come up eventually and briefly, although not in reference to robots.

It was a summer's evening nearing dusk, marred only slightly by the rain falling softly as I worked the broad bean stems into the net the once-weekly gardener had put up yesterday before the storm. For such work, I wore an old grey dress from my governess days, worn and let out at the seams where my abdomen yet resisted as much corseting as before our child. The moon was the faintest sliver past new and hung low in the west, near the sun's last rays. Mrs. Fairfax and Adele were watching our young son indoors. My breath caught in my throat to see a figure approaching, all but stumbling in an unevenness in the lawn, some hole that had not been redressed. 

Then I realized it was my Edward, by silhouette as much as anything, and he caught his foot briefly on one of Adele's croquet hoops we must have left in the lawn. 

"Jane, my dearest fairy--!" he called as he neared me.

"There's no need for you to come out this way," I said, though gently. 

"Isn't there?" my husband had found the strip of rock laid down to keep the lawn out of the garden and now he bent and removed his shoes, laying them in the grass at the border, throwing his near-useless tailcoat there as well. "As miasmic as the air is, Jane, it is still so warm we oughtn't catch cold--I could not resist."

I took one last survey of the bean plants, determining they were all interwoven enough, as I said, "No, the air is clean enough, and smells of rain and grass, not illness, but I do not know why you are out here. Could you not have sent someone?"

"Jane--" and now he was beside me, the whole fingers of his good hand ghosting over my ear and jaw. "I thought of my great fairy and how she must be full in her glory in the damp and this mud--" he lifted one foot as if to indicate--indeed the wet loam clung to his toes and rose up around the foot that remained planted in the bed. Did he mean he would have me even like this, damp through and grimy? For, though I would not say such aloud, the bare feet of my Vulcan grounded in the summer mud, his skin damp and hair dripping only made my heart grow fonder. The notion of love-making outdoors, and the laundry that would be incurred were forbidding, but good sense had rarely e're stopped us. "Mistress of the growing soil, Ceres--"

I met these fancies with a mete protest, if surely one irrelevant, "Edward, I am well; the garden merely needed tending."

"I can see it in my mind's eye, that this gentle rain has caused your hair to curl most alluringly."

I frowned--not that he could see it, and decided it was no use to protest that my hair was, naturally, tied up. In fact, I reached up to unfasten it, to what end I knew not, and before I could effect that change, found Edward's hand at my waist, the one which had seen some damage in the fire. 

He whispered into my ear, "Jane, dearest, let me prove how I love you, here among the damp and the mud, in your glory, my good witch, before only the eyes of Heaven." I was being propositioned in our garden, by my husband, no thing I had been trained for, even as I had thought it moments before.

"Edward--what of the servants? What if someone should happen by?" But even as I made this most reasonable objection, heat and desire bloomed in my stomach and my own hand made its way to his trousers, barely dirtied from the plants themselves, and slid along the waistband to undo the button there. 

"There is no one nearby but Adele and Fairfax, and they are on the opposite side of the house. We are behind hedges, dearest Janet, and so what if someone should?" So he remembered such minutiae of the layout, even now, in the frenzy of passion! And with a final twist of my fingers, his waistband fell slightly open and I tugged his loose shirt free from it.

"Very well," I agreed, in a low hiss, giving in entirely.

"Then I want you freed as well," he murmured, in response to my efforts, and took to the buttons at my back, working his way steadily up. "Are we clear of the plants? It would not do for this ogre to entice his fairy into crushing her plants, however much passion should overtake them."

"The grass will be neater," I said, undoing the cravat I straightened for him every morning.

He answered fervently, "I do not mind the mud, Janet."

At that moment I thought I should not mind it either, our bodies things of soil joining once again in ecstasy, now among the humble dust whence their bones. "The laundress will," I pointed out, leaving the choice to chance in our passion. I pulled up at his shirt until it came free of one arm and his head. Now my dress was unfastened, and he applied his damp fingers to the ties of my corset, loosening it, if roughly, until I probably _could_ slip from it.

He tugged at it and we wrestled with the garment until it came free over my head and we overbalanced, falling into the grass, I in my chemise, drawers and petticoat, and Edward with his shirt half-off and trousers unbuttoned, falling open to give me what anyone should call an indecent view.

"I say we first mind ourselves, my changeling Janet and only then others, and as for _obeying_, well--!" he commented, offhand, as he shucked off the trousers, and then threw aside his shirt. "You fae have wills of your own and do I adore it!"

"I mind you, my Edward," I softly reminded him, and after all he had just thwarted with his determination to remove his clothes the intentions that had blossomed into my head from the aforementioned indecent sight like the formation of clouds in a clear summer sky.

"Oh, when it pleases you. And please you I hope this does," he said, and then softly damned my chemise as the wet cloth frustrated his attempt to trail his mouth down between my breasts, leaving kisses there. It did _not_ stop my feeling his hand lightly down my torso, sending a frisson of heat into my belly and loins. And I caught his mouth with mine, kissing so sweet and heatedly I welcomed the cool feeling of the rain...

I leave further details to an obscuring haze of pleasure that clouds their memory, and to discretion, reader, but yes, we knew each other yet again, for the first time out in the rain and soil and under no roof but the sky.


End file.
